battery drain problem

Hi, I've done some searching of the forums to see if this has been asked but none of the posts seem to be related that I found.

My problem started this morning. I picked up my palm pre from the charger and the phone seemed warm. Within 2 hours of taking the phone off the charger, the battery had drained 50% which is typically the drain after a full day of use for me. I've only owned the phone for 40 days. The phone was also acting odd today. It was sluggish and when the phone app was up, the tab in the top left corner said 'phone offline', which I've never seen before. I restarted the phone, thinking maybe some app or the OS was stuck in some loop that was keeping the processor running at maximum thus draining the battery and causing the phone to heat up. Unfortunately, the problem continued. I then tried removing the battery and then restarting it. Problem continued. Within another hour the phone was dead.

I brought it to the sprint store and they didn't seem to think anything was wrong with the phone after the tech ran his tests on it. They told me I need a new battery which they have to order. I'm, honestly, skeptical that this is actually the problem but I am hoping that is the problem.

Well I'm sure its not the battery now. I basically stopped my email syncs with my gmail account and the problem stopped. I just restarted the syncing at larger intervals. It was every 30 minutes. Now I have it set every several hours. I'm not sure that it was the interval that explains the problem since it was set at 30 minutes and it was never a problem before. I'm thinking the application got hung up during a sync and the processor was maxed out.

Anyone else have this problem or any suggestions as to what exactly was wrong and how to prevent it?